User talk:Tom Christiansen
Welcome, Tom, and thanks for your contributions! (And copyediting my careless punctuation.) You're the Perl guy, aren't you? ---- Thanks, Steve! I didn’t know how to talk to people here before. I have a slew of questions. : Ask away! *Yup, that’s me. Mine’s also the long Tiassa review on Amazon (which I need to fix to read Iorich instead of Dzur), and a few longer entries on skzb’s blog. I’d just quit TSR in Lake Geneva to go to college when Jhereg came out, and have read them all as soon as they were available. *: I recognized your name first on the Amazon review, (Very good!) then wondered if you were the same guy who'd been hanging round here lately. Then Wikipedia'd you. I didn't know you'd worked for the Gygax gang though, that's very cool. Did you know that all of Dragaera was developed first in an RPG? That answered a lot of questions for me about how Jhereg could be as deep and rich as it was, as a first novel. *Yup, that’s me. Mine’s also the long Tiassa review on Amazon (which I need to fix to read Iorich instead of Dzur), and a few longer entries on skzb’s blog. I’d just quit TSR in Lake Geneva to go to college when Jhereg came out, and have read them all as soon as they were available. *: I recognized your name first on the Amazon review, (Very good!) then wondered if you were the same guy who'd been hanging round here lately. Then Wikipedia'd you. I didn't know you'd worked for the Gygax gang though, that's very cool. Did you know that all of Dragaera was developed first in an RPG? That answered a lot of questions for me about how Jhereg could be as deep and rich as it was, as a first novel. : I have been reading the Taltos series since Jhereg was released too, but thought of it as 'light amusement' until around Phoenix when I realized it was something more. Or just got so fanboyish that it became something more to me. Let's see, I have a set of Tiassa quotes that I’ve thought of putting it, but don’t know what is reasonable and customary. Some books have far more extensive quoting sections that others, and I don't want to stomp on skzb’s good graces. : Far as I know, the quote sections are all too short, and Mr. Brust has never complained or warned otherwise. All the quotes seem to come from Majikjon (Jon Lincicum) who posts frequently on Brust's blog too, so I'm guessing if there was a danger of overquoting, Jon would be the first to know. I'm not really one for remembering cool quotes until someone else points out how cool they are -- I tend to get invested in character and plot arcs, and analysis of the kind I thought was stupid back in English class but now seem to enjoy. Another question has to do with Unicode on the site. I noticed a few pages do use it, but not many. I remember seeing some IPA somewhere or other, and you’ll’ve seen that I use Unicode in the Meta::Telnan page to put the Greek there. Mostly it’s just a matter of using better dashes/hyphens and quotes/apostrophes. It’s really not much harder for me to type “proper” quotes than straight ones, and it does look better, so I don’t mind at all. : I think it's right to use Unicode where you can -- just checked and Wikipedia and Mediawiki switched to UTF-8 in June 2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Special_characters and they seem to be running bots that convert text over, once in a while. At least on wikipedia. So it may be that the point is moot, if someone at wikia develops bots to go round converting encoding errors over time. People on Windows boxes might have more trouble with it; I don’t know, because I’ve never used one. I do try to leave existing pages as they are, though, unless I’m doing a major reworking — it just doesn’t look good to have multiple styles on the same page, so I try to stay with what’s there. : Agreed. Bots can always fix it later. I’ll try to do some of the minor characters from Tiassa when I get the chance, like the rest of the Special Tasks group and such. I’m in cram mode right now, and sometimes I need a break from hacking. We’re going to have to reword some of stuff about music, too, I think, based on what we learned in Tiassa. : Please do keep it up! This wiki keeps me occupied when I should be working, too. What are you cramming at the moment? -- Tom Christiansen 00:12, April 12, 2011 (UTC) Some notes on the others -- this wiki has a rather small core group. It seems to consist of Davdi, Jon, Attjen, me, and lately Mark Mandel (who has had his own amazing Dragaera site since the web began!) Since each of us focuses on different things we seldom end up conflicting or feeling the need to correct each others' work. Though Jon and I sometimes disagree creatively on the speculation sections! I don't see much copyediting done (I do some when I notice errors, but seldom take the time to go into blue-pencil mode), so I was really happy to see your work. I think your contributions are sorely needed. Since skzb comes here occasionally to straighten stuff out in his mind while writing new books, we have a kind of responsibility to keep things clear and organized, but in general this place is for fun. Great to have you! Welcome again, Steve Rapaport (Steve the Younger) Thesaurus I saw this today and thought of you! http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html Steve R 12:26, May 8, 2011 (UTC)